Google's former svp/product management Jonathan Rosenberg was in London with chairman Eric Schmidt …

… Schmidt had some more down-to-earth advice. Google really needs data analytics people and folks who have studied statistics in college, he said.

Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about.

And then Rosenberg said something really interesting. If you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab, he said.

And, who’s the only SUU professor who has experience with Matlab? Yours truly. I gave up trying to get funding to buy Matlab for SUU about 10 years ago … no one had any vision about what it would be used for.

FWIW: I wouldn’t even worry about Matlab just yet. In order to use Matlab you really need to have taken linear algebra. I wouldn’t even worry about linear algebra yet though. In order to take linear algebra, you need two semesters of calculus. And that’s not business calculus, or ECON 2500. So, there’s a plan: Calculus I, Calculus II, Linear Algebra, talk to Tufte about learning Matlab.